Improving Product Development Processes
HP Integrity Server-based solutions for PDM
Abstract: To successfully compete in today’s global economy, you must consistently be first to the market with innovative products. Sounds simple, right? But how do you get there? Improving your product development processes is one of the best ways to get quality products to market faster. A powerful, next-generation product data management (PDM) solution is an essential component of your success.
PDM solutions have two major components: the application and a computing solution platform. To take full advantage of an optimized PDM application you need a solution platform and an IT infrastructure that is optimized for the application. For example, moving from a legacy HP PA-RISC processor-based server to an HP BladeSystem can elevate your PDM solution to a new level of efficiency, automation, and productivity.
The HP BladeSystem provides dense packaging with reduced overall power requirements. Not only does it put a huge amount of computing in a small space, it maximizes cooling and power efficiency on the fly. The HP BladeSystem is only one of the many innovations targeted at next-generation PDM solutions requirements. Scalability, maintainability, and “future-proofing”—the ability to easily upgrade to new technology—are examples of system features desired by IT managers supporting PDM applications.
Next-generation PDM Solutions and HP BladeSystem: Optimize your Product Development
A proven strategy to successfully compete in today’s global economy is to be first to market with innovative products. Sounds simple, right? But how
do you get there?
Improving your product development processes is one of the best ways. A powerful product data management (PDM) solution can go a long way in streamlining product development, and is an essential component of your long and short term success.
Next generation PDM moves you forward
Yesterday’s PDM solutions may have served you well in the past, but they can’t keep pace with the challenges your complex organization is facing today.
A next-generation PDM solution can help you:
•Accelerate return on investment
•Smoothly integrate with existing enterprise software solutions
•Streamline processes and practices across the enterprise
•Control deployment and maintenance costs
•Enhance productivity
•Consolidate and future-proof the IT environment
What’s holding you back?
It’s possible that your current IT infrastructures can’t support your fast-moving PDM goals. To meet these goals, you must modernize your IT infrastructures with cutting-edge solutions and strategies.
To keep pace with next generation PDM solutions, you need a modern infrastructure that takes advantage of the latest IT infrastructures and strategies—adding value at every step in the product development process. An innovative and flexible infrastructure reduces lifecycle costs, transforms your decision-making capabilities, improves time to market, and increases productivity and increases product innovation.
From legacy to leadership
If you’re still using legacy hardware platforms to run today’s PDM applications, you’re not taking full advantage of recent innovations in applications software. To leverage the new solutions, you need to turn to more modern, powerful, and feature-rich architectures. Moving from a legacy HP PA-RISC processor-based server to an HP Integrity server is an
opportunity to elevate your enterprise PDM solution to a new level of efficiency, automation, and productivity.
Leveraging its close relationships with the leading PDM applications vendors, HP has optimized its Integrity servers for the next generation PDM solutions. Based
on the Intel® Itanium® processor, the HP Integrity server architecture is ideally suited to the tiered nature of PDM applications, enabling the web and database tiers to run much faster. Depending on your current HP PA-RISC processor-based server, the database performance increase can be two to seven times faster.1
Additionally, HP Integrity Server Blades provide attractive efficiencies of scale. For example, an HP Integrity Server Blade with two processors is typically faster and more powerful than a RISC system with four processors. An HP Integrity BladeSystem is able to handle the same number of users with improved performance, dynamic workload balancing, and better scalability—while reducing your total cost of ownership (TCO).
Migrating to an HP Integrity BladeSystem benefits all levels of customers: executives, IT professionals and the engineering teams.
For the executive, migration lowers TCO, helps consolidate infrastructure, and refines the supply chain and customer relationships while freeing up resources
for innovation. An HP Integrity BladeSystem requires fewer processors than a legacy system, reducing capital outlay. Also, operating expenses are reduced because of lower maintenance, facilities, and system administration requirements.
IT professionals realize the same benefits as executives and they’ll also appreciate a solution that’s easy to manage and requires fewer resources. The HP Integrity BladeSystem infrastructure makes consolidation a snap, with comprehensive virtualization software, sophisticated system management tools, and unified infrastructure management software.
For engineering, the product development and design teams will enjoy increased performance, resulting in quicker access to data, the ability to manage large designs, and efficient collaboration with other design teams. Uploads and downloads will be faster— regardless of the amount of data involved—and maintaining data quality control will be easier.
Build a modern PDM infrastructure with optimal tools At the core of modern IT infrastructure is the powerful 64-bit HP Integrity Server Blade. Coupled with HP BladeSystem all-in-one enclosures, this solution offers increased efficiency and scalability through a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Using this innovative infrastructure, you’ll be able to connect more processes across technological and geographical boundaries.
Building a mission-critical solution within the modular HP BladeSystem delivers advantages not possible from standalone systems. You save time by utilizing HP Insight Control management software because it allows you to deploy, maintain, and enhance your entire server infrastructure. You save energy by employing HP Thermal Logic technology. And you increase simplicity with the HP Virtual Connect because it allows you to wire once and then add, replace and recover server and storage blades on the fly. That means you can implement the applications you need now, and then easily add more as your requirements change.
Another advantage of the HP BladeSystem is virtualization—a technology that leads to the consolidation of server resources and improved TCO. Virtualization creates the illusion of many independent systems, each containing its own dedicated hardware and software, even though they may physically be sharing the resources of a single server. The virtual systems can be allocated and scheduled on the fly, which greatly increases hardware efficiency.
Another benefit of virtualization is increased reliability, for example, if a virtual system fails, the application can be restarted on another virtual system.
The blade architecture is tailor-made for virtualization because of its efficiency and partitioning technology. The HP Partitioning Continuum offers multiple methods of partitioning available resources—from hard partitions that electrically isolate partitions, to softer resource partitioning. In a PDM environment, a mix of partition types can be configured to provide optimal performance and reliability—all while maximizing hardware utilization and lowering facilities costs.
Next-generation PDM solutions: your competitive advantage
Remember, to meet your fast moving PDM goals, you need a modern IT infrastructure that will allow you to gain a competitive advantage at every step in your product development process. Optimized hardware and software technologies will not only cut costs, but will allow you to produce a better product and bring it to market faster.
